You

Raising bookworms

How do you get your child to read in these techno-crazy times? Meher Marfatia asks families who have succeeded

Posted On Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 11:45:36 PM

Kabir and Karun Krishnamurthy are motivated to read as they don’t have a TV at home

Kids discuss books at Sonya Dutta Choudhury’s reading programme over cake and juice

The hip film in town, Twilight, has driven a new wave of fans to bookstores to buy Stephenie Meyer’s cult series. Before this, it was the Potter tomes that brought in pre-teen readers.

Are children reading too thinly between the JK Rowling and Meyer’s sagas? Can parents keep them glued to books, when snappy sound bytes and glitzy images on screens are way more tantalising to wandering young minds.

Follow me
In Raising Kids Who Learn to Read, language arts educator Bernice Cullinan recommends reading aloud to children as old as 12, even after reading alone is a competently established skill.

The idea is to continue with the sense of bonding this evokes, is vital to emotional development.

“It’s all cyclical,” explains Crossword co-founder R Sriram. “Reading peaks between the ages of 6 and 13.

Then it drops, thanks to other entertaining temptations or pressure to study. Children need to see reading parents, with books as accessible in the house as the TV remote.”

Pressure hardly helps. It’s taken Delna Sanghvi patience and gentle coaxing over a couple of years to get her son Rihan enthused about reading.

Initially reluctant, in complete contrast to his bookworm brother, the nine-year-old used to breeze cursorily through “nice short books” alone.

What slowly worked was sitting and reading to him, before stopping at exciting moments in the story. That nudged his keenness to go forward with the narrative.

Apart from tapping curiosity, Sanghvi suggests encouraging children to even dip into books that seem childish for them. She recalls Rihan flipping through an illustrated Jungle Book edition endlessly, as she wondered when he would graduate to age-appropriate texts. Today, he leads a school’s book club.

Choices, voices
Paediatrician Vibha Krishnamurthy faced a similar block. She allowed her reluctant reader son Karun to select books of high interest to him — Pokemon and Jackie Chan adventures. His mother cringed, given that the family library was stocked with beautiful children’s books.

Yet, she let him read what he fancied. When he wanted to discuss a book, she read a few. “For books he did not pick up himself, we did paired reading,” she shares.

“He read aloud, I supplied words he got stuck at, to make sure we did not sacrifice continuity for reading skills. When we stopped mid-story, I would find him edging back towards the book to find out what happened.”

What helped is that the Krishnamurthy home has no TV and Karun has three reader role-models — his parents and brother Kabir.

“When he was not a skilled reader, he took great pride in announcing to guests that he hated reading. We ignored this and made it a point when he did read, to tell people when he was within earshot, how well he read.”

Avoid deciding what children should read; they don’t have to begin with literature. So long as nothing is inappropriate, let them make the choices.

Keeping older children reading is writer Sonya Dutta Choudhury’s challenge. Her programme, Talking Books, questions: Where do you go after Enid Blyton? Over cake and juice, her young brood discusses offbeat books — from zippy spoofs such as Ian Ogilvy’s Measle and the Dragodon, to sci-fi winners such as Satyajit Ray’s Diary of a Space Traveller and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

“In books, you give every child a friend forever,” says Dutta Choudhury. Reading powers vocabulary, comprehension and communication — three critical skills to negotiate a complex world.

	Mail this article Print this article Translate this article	Rate me....
	Share Share Share Share

Contribute/ Share your Opinion

You

Raising bookworms

Contribute/ Share your Opinion

More